Turn your deceased loved ones into diamonds?

posted at 8:51 am on December 6, 2013 by Jazz Shaw

I get that some people look at non-traditional ways to inter their loved ones after death and how we remember the deceased is a very personal decision. There has long been a debate between those who choose cremation and families who choose a more traditional burial. Those with enough financial resources can even have their ashes shot into space. But the latest news just sounds a bit creepy to me. Would you like to turn your departed relative into a diamond ring?

It may sound a bit dark, but it’s now possible to transform the ashes of the cremated deceased into a diamond–a jewel truly to remember.

Using “Russian technology,” Algordanza Memorial Diamonds are created in a similar fashion to the way natural diamonds are formed.

Here’s how it works: a diamond is composed of pressurized carbons. Conveniently enough, human bodies are about 18 percent carbon. Using about a pound of ashes, the firm is able to distill out the carbon and use it to form a man-made diamond in a mold under high pressure in about a week. The diamonds created this way are often blue because of certain chemicals in the human body.

Algordanza, headquartered in Switzerland, offers a variety of diamond sizes and cuts that can be placed on a ring or other jewelry pieces. Prices run higher than conventional diamonds, starting from about $3,000 depending on the size and cut.

Maybe I’m overreacting here and this could turn out to be popular? After all, some who have their loved ones cremated keep the ashes in their homes in decorative urns. It’s not as if everyone feels that they body absolutely has to be buried in the ground. But the idea of jamming the remains into a separator to filter out the carbon and then smash them under sufficient pressure to morph their molecular structure into a rock just sounds a little … creepy.

How about it? Would you want to take your spouse or parent or child and convert them to a ring or broach? Would people really wear this type of jewelry to a party and engage the attendees with tales of the dearly departed? Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be trying to wriggle out of that conversation pretty quickly.

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Maybe I’m overreacting here and this could turn out to be popular? After all, some who have their loved ones cremated keep the ashes in their homes in decorative urns. It’s not as if everyone feels that they body absolutely has to be buried in the ground. But the idea of jamming the remains into a separator to filter out the carbon and then smash them under sufficient pressure to morph their molecular structure into a rock just sounds a little … creepy.

Alas I cannot have my desires carried out. At least legally anyway. I want to embrace my American Indian heritage and have by body placed on a platform for the critters to eat or put into a boat and burned. My wife says a couple of virgins burning with me is right out. Bummer. Anyway I told my wife and kids that they will have to cremate me, mold the ashes into a human like figure, get a couple of dollar store “Barbies”, some beef jerky, fruit, nuts, some nip bottles of booze, place it all in a small wooden boat and set it adrift burning. I told them if they wanted to use flaming arrows to set it aflame it was their choice. To be honest I doubt any of them could hit a toy boat with an arrow. If they feared the authorities would nail them for pollution of a pond or lake they had the option of using a pool, preferably of someone I don’t like or good sized puddle.

But the idea of jamming the remains into a separator to filter out the carbon and then smash them under sufficient pressure to morph their molecular structure into a rock just sounds a little … creepy.

Oh I don’t know…….there are some people I’d like to do that to while they’re still alive. Like those child-killers on Death Row. Then the state could auction off the diamond as a means of reducing prison costs.

I’m not really creeped out by this, in fact I think it’s novel and has a certain appeal.

The shooting of ashes into outer space is awesome, though I’d like to be kept whole, glued to a Harley, and be launched into deep space just like that. Let an alien race discover a strange creature covered in some sort of body markings and attached to a mechanical conveyance.

Ditto what others before me said; this isn’t new.
A trip to one’s fav morturary reveals that you can have a necklace or bracelet with Dad’s cremains inside a little orb.
How creepy is that; carrying cremains around everywhere.

Others say this has been around a while but this is the first time I have heard about it. I find it to be an absolutely intriguing and appealing idea. If my loved ones agree to this, it would be a serious option.

Personally, I would prefer to return to nature the really old fashioned way (buzzards, ants, etc) but I have cremation specified because I am appalled at the idea of bod in coffin taking up room in the ground.

Jane notices Pattie’s new diamond ring.
Jane: That’s a beautiful stone.
Pattie: Thanks. *sticking out her hand so it can be admired* It was mom.
Jane: Oh, heirlooms are so nice.
Pattie: No, not “mom’s”. It was mom.
Jane: oh

Dr. Frank Enstine on December 6, 2013 at 9:10 AM

Oh yeah, Viking cremation is always a great way to go. Done right, you can turn it into a neighborhood combination wake/funeral/bbq. Make sure you invite the fire department – it will make permitting easier and ensure nothing goes too horribly wrong.

Actually, this could be interesting, as you could put mom and dad together “eternally” on a ring. You could do up your whole family tree over time on a nice brooch………

Or you could quit being selfish, grow up, and realize that regardless of what you believe about afterlife when you are dead you are done with the ol’ meat sack and donate your body/organs to science, medical training or something else useful.

And a secondary upside to that is telling the thieving mortician to ‘GFY’.

This hearkens back to the Victorian-era practice of creating a memento mori to remember loved ones. They would take photographs of themselves with the newly dead, make elaborate jewelry and woven images out of hair, and that kind of thing. Not quite Egyptian in creepy cultural obsession with death, but coming close.

Here’s an example: A woman’s husband died, so she had one of his molars made into a ring.

When Mom died we had her cremated at a Catholic Funeral Parlor (as per her wishes after consulting her priest a few years before her death) and she’s interred in a Columbarium next to my grandparents in a Catholic Mausoleum. On All Souls Day my sister and I go to the Requiem Mass at my church…

“The first thing to remember about Catholic funerals is the Truth that the body of the dead one will be resurrected and reunited with the soul when Jesus comes again at the Last Judgment. In addition, if the deceased is saved, his body will be glorified. For this reason, the bodies of our loved ones are treated with the utmost respect and, so, it is against Catholic custom to cremate the body, having been allowable in the past only during times of pestilence, for ex., when cremation was done for the common good. Now, however, the 1983 Code of Canon Law (Can. 1176 §3) reads

The Church earnestly recommends that the pious custom of burial be retained; but it does not forbid cremation, unless this is chosen for reasons which are contrary to Christian teaching….

“For Christians, burial is not the disposal of a thing. It is caring for a person. In burial, we’re reminded that the body is not a shell, a husk tossed aside by the “real” person, the soul within. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:6–8; Phil. 1:23), but the body that remains still belongs to someone, someone we love, someone who will reclaim it one day.

Our father Abraham did not “dispose” of the “container” previously occupied by his loved one. Moses tells us that “Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah east of Mamre (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan” (Gen. 23:19, emphasis mine). His burial of his wife, returning her to the dust from which she came, honored our foremother, in precise distinction from the shamefulness with which our God views the leaving of bodies to decompose publicly (Is. 5:25).

The Gospel of John tells us that “Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days” (John 11:17). The Holy Spirit chose to identify this body as Lazarus, communicating continuity with the very same person Jesus had loved before and would love again.

After the crucifixion of Jesus, the Gospels present us with an example of devotion to Jesus in the way the women—and Joseph of Arimathea—minister to him, anointing him with spices, specifically anointing, Mark tells us, him and not just “his remains” (Mark 16:1), and wrapping him in a shroud. Why is Mary Magdalene so grieved when she finds the tomb to be empty? It is not that she doubts that a stolen body can be resurrected by God on the last day. It is instead that she sees violence done to the body of Jesus as violence done to him, dishonor done to his body as dishonor to him. When Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener, she tells him she is despondent because they “have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:13). This body was, at least in some sense, still her Lord, and it mattered what someone had done to it. Jesus and the angelic beings never correct the devoted women. They simply ponder why they seek the living among the dead.

If one defies tradition and the Church’s earnest recommendation and does opt for cremation, or if one reasonably cremates because of the threat of disease, the remains must still be interred at a cemetery; they can’t be kept at one’s home or be scattered….”

Personally, I kind of think it’s a bit creepy, too. Not something I’d have done for myself or anybody I cared about.

As a former Jeweler, this was on the horizon around the time I was getting out. It’s more the kind of thing a funeral home would handle than a service a jeweler would offer. Jewelers aren’t equipped to handle bodies or ship them.

If somebody came in with a stone and wanted to have it set, I guess we’d do it for them. Assuming my bench guys didn’t have an objection about it. They’d have probably made a show of holding me up for a six-pack over it.